Following his retirement as a player in 2011, it didn't take Gary Neville long to get the ball rolling on his next career, as he quickly became one of English football's most popular pundits.
After a decade of analysing the game for Sky Sports, the former Manchester United and England man diversified further, setting up The Overlap YouTube Channel in 2021.
This saw Neville shift his focus to in-depth conversations with some of the biggest names in sport, from Harry Kane and Anthony Joshua to Dina Asher-Smith. Over the past five years, the channel has become a huge success, with Neville admitting that its origins were more personal than commercial.
Neville on what influenced him to start The Overlap
Neville insists that rather than spotting a gap in the market, it was his own desire to improve his own interviewing skills and move away from short-form, bite-sized social media content to something more meaningful that was his initial motivation.
“There was no gap in the market,” Neville tells FourFourTwo. “There was just a gap in my head of something that I was missing. It's a bit embarrassing to admit, but there’d be times at Sky when managers would come into the studio, there’d be Dave or Kelly, Carra and me, we’d ask them questions and I thought ‘I’m really bad at this’.
In a world where TikTok clips, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels often dominate the social media landscape, Neville did not want to follow the crowd.
“Lots of people were pushing me to do more bitesize content, 60 to 90 seconds, to fit TikTok and Instagram," he continues. "I didn’t want to do that, but I thought there was an opportunity to do two things – get better at interviewing people and keep traditional long-form interviews. So I just started walking with people. On a beach, on a golf course, and I just talked to them – a good conversation about football, boxing or whatever.
“It was never about podcasts. I don’t listen to podcasts, it was about becoming a better interviewer and creating an interesting television programme. That’s how I see it – it’s a television programme we put on YouTube.
"We do sometimes get described as a podcast, but to me it’s a visual thing. I’ve done podcasts where you do them remotely – you can be at home, the other people can be in their homes, and I don’t get it. I don’t feel it. I’ve got to be sat there with people to bounce off them, to feel their energy, to feel their enthusiasm.
“What has happened since then has been a great journey – it’s a team I love working with and I’m incredibly proud to be a part of. We never thought of it as a business, we just wanted to create something that people loved and would come back to watch every week.”
The team he mentions is led by co-founder Scott Melvin, who worked as a senior producer at Sky Sports on Super Sunday and Monday Night Football for 17 years, and is backed up by a staff with a background in television, working for Sky and BBC.
“It’s always a risk when you start something from scratch,” Melvin says. “We started the production company first, Buzz 16, then The Overlap grew out of that. What started off as a side hustle has become this thing we never expected it to be. We’ve all learned as we’ve gone along, but we didn’t start it as a business, it started off as Gary just having some fun on YouTube.
“Sky Bet came on board very early, were brilliant with us and are still a really important partner for us now. Then we started Stick to Football, which was the turning point. Again it was a bit of a punt because let’s be honest, it wasn’t a particularly revolutionary idea – let’s get five people around a table and talk about football. But the difference was the people.”
